The spy who bored me: a review of the action movie "Argyle"
Matthew Vaughn reshoots "bondiana" without getting off the couch.
Ellie Conway (Bryce Dallas Howard) is a talented writer of spy novels with a decent fan base, a caring mother (Catherine O'Hara) with obvious editing skills, and a charming but silent Scottish Fold cat named Alfie. Over the past five years, Ellie has published four books about the adventures of secret agent Aubrey Argyle (Henry Cavill) and is about to finish a fifth, but writer's block ruins her plans. Struggling to cope with the crisis, the girl takes a train toward her ancestral home, but along the way she meets a man named Aiden (Sam Rockwell) cosplaying Forrest Gump during a run across America. Within a couple of hours of meeting Aiden, he's already scattering hulking muzzies all over the carriage, and the uncomprehending Ellie is left with no choice but to stay close to her untidy savior.
It quickly becomes clear that Conway's novels are not fiction, but rather the very real repressed memories of a super spy. Only the protagonist of incredible adventures is not a burly man with a Henry Cavill smile and a hairstyle that screams of the return of the 90's, but Ellie herself, five years ago survived clinical death and memory loss. And now the operative Rachel Kyle (Ellie's real name) is being hunted by her former bosses from the organization "Division", who arranged a theater with a fake writing career in the hope to get to the right information through the heroine's subconscious.
Director Matthew Vaughn was famous for deconstructing genre settings with "Kick-Ass" and "Kingsman: The Secret Service," but has steadily lowered the bar in subsequent sequels and prequels. "Argyle," no doubt intended as a fresh take on spy action movies, turns out to really be a deconstruction. About the same deconstruction was the Alien that burst from the chest of John Hurt's character in the movie of the same name. Matthew Vaughn placed a romcom larva in the body of an average spy comedy action movie, slowly feeding it with scenes in which the protagonists timidly come together after intense action or drive along the sun-drenched roads of France. Throughout the movie, the romcom slowly but surely takes over the host body, until finally, to the accompaniment of one of the most ridiculous fight scenes of the early part of the year, it sheds the desiccated skin of the used genre, rising to its full height.
Trickster Vaughan seems to have gone a little overboard and fooled everyone in general. Argyle's box office is terrible, and the press even worse. But perhaps it's a matter of initial misconceptions about the subject matter. The expectations of the public drew a comedy action movie at least the level of Kingsman'a, with the ingenuity of Bourne and the gloss of "Bondiana", and Matthew Vaughn took and gave out a disguised pile of false plots "My Big Greek Wedding". And everything would be all right, because, as the classic said, "our expectations are our problems," but "Argyle" is so oversaturated with masking elements that by the end the viewer simply tires of the path to the essence. Even a fine cast does not save. Yes, there is no place for professionals to turn around, but the artists put their soul into every sneeze. Rockwell dances, Howard for a second with one eye reincarnates from a frightened provincial writer to a predator with a license to kill, Bryan Cranston gives out a classic Bond villain, and Henry Cavill with one smile shows Barbara Broccoli, what a huge mistake she made by not taking him for the role of the next Bond.
To endure a two-hour session of "Argyle", even taking into account the few pluses (including the possibility of taking a nap at particularly long moments), is not an easy ordeal. That said, the movie doesn't make a negative impression; there's just too much of it. Vaughn's lack of restraint can be attributed to the protracted shooting and varied geography of locations, but only partially. Otherwise, the Argyle project has the same maladies that haunt every picture of the director, starting with "Kingsman: The Golden Ring": overly complicated and bloated script and immoderate timekeeping. In addition, Vaughn has not abandoned the attempt to link all his recent films into one universe, which is alarming: someone must stop the expansion of the spy black hole.
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